


Variations on a Theme: With Blasterfire

by Trebia



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Interstellar Transmissions 'Verse, Sexual Content, fanfic of a fanfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-31 01:16:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6449629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trebia/pseuds/Trebia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How they make it work not-so-perfectly, told in moments.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Variations on a Theme: With Blasterfire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ricca_riot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ricca_riot/gifts), [LovelyThings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LovelyThings/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Interstellar Transmissions](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5496170) by [LovelyThings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LovelyThings/pseuds/LovelyThings), [ricca_riot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ricca_riot/pseuds/ricca_riot). 



> [Variations on a Theme by Tchaikovsky (Arensky)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1DYHt8yBWI)

_Theme, Moderato_

 

 _> >>_BEGIN HOLONET SESSION

 

HOLONET QUERY: perfection (STANDARD GALACTIC BASIC DEFINITION)

 

_perfection_

 

**NOUN**

 

_the condition, state, or quality of being free or as free as possible from all flaws or defects._

 

 _> >>_END HOLONET SESSION, TERMINATE CONNECTION

 

_Variation I, Un poco più mosso_

 

Statura is soto-voiced, droning low and long in the war room on D’Qar. Kess shifts her weight to another leg, easing the kinks out of her spine as other officers mimic her movements - it’s as if she’s yawned and spawned an epidemic of the act, a simple bodily reminder that she’s _tired_ or _I’ve been standing here for three hours straight_. 

 

“Captain?” Statura’s voice breaks through her thoughts. There’s about five captains in this room, but the other four turn to her. They know who it is Statura is referring to when he wants a captain’s input during a briefing session. Kess glances up, quashing the surprised expression that wants to eek its way across her face. Kess spins her thoughts around, throwing them into reverse as she thumbs through the statistics on her flimsy.

 

“I’d agree that the antipirate fleet in the D’Astan sector needs serious bolstering to becoming fully operational against an older model ISD or one of their newer ships of the line, but we’ve only a few light cruisers to spare at this point. The Outer Rim territories should be maintained as a priority as they’re the only buffer zone we can maintain between the Unknown Regions and the Core,” her voice booms out over everyone’s heads ahead of her - it makes the Bothan in front of her jump. 

 

Statura, appeased now by calling out one of them, drifts away from her group of officers before zeroing in on an ambassadorial attache from the senate, grilling them about funding. Kess relaxes back into parade rest. 

 

_Variation II, Allegro non troppo_

 

Aliens aren’t commonplace in the First Order. The F.O. follows the doctrine of the Galactic Empire, believing the inheritance of humans is built on the backs of dominated, weaker species in their path. It’s a shock for the Exes and himself to adjust to this entirely new culture around them on D’Qar after they turn coats on the Order. 

 

They’re just getting out of a debriefing with Resistance Intel, loaded down with new gear as they cross the flight pads to the bunkers where they’ve been assigned berths. Everyone is in a rush around them and the Exes feel for the first time disoriented, out of the usual flow of hustle and bustle. Normally moored in the familiarity of the Order, they’re adrift and all turn their eyes to Gun as he tries to catch the attention of a passing Resistance officer.

 

“Officer,” he barks out, trying to catch the attention of a uniformed Togruta woman. He isn’t familiar with her insignia yet, but can figure from a quick scan of her decor that she’s possibly a captain. She proves him correct after slowly turning to examine him and the Exes.

 

“That’ll be Captain Kess, lieutenant,” she is brusque to the point of almost coming off as surly, her blue gaze reminding him of being caught in the cross-hairs of a rifle’s scope.

 

Gun grins.

 

_Variation III, Andantino tranquillo_

 

His designator chip rests just below his trapezius. Command must’ve imagined that it’d be harder for disillusioned ‘Troopers to dig it out with knife-point if they put it where only another could remove it. A bird darts overhead in the small clearing on D’Qar.

 

Gun has discovered during his time with the Resistance that he works _well_ with aliens, despite all the propaganda spewed out by the Order. The one that watches his six is the Togruta captain always in Ren’s shadow, or _Captain Kess_ as he’s come to know her. She’s a deadly shot and not a half bad sparrer, he’s discovered. They’ve formed a tenuous friendship in the space between ops, officer to officer.

 

When he asked her to do a favor for him, she didn’t back down with what it entailed. He’d done it for all the Exes. Now she could do it for him.

 

“They put it in pretty deep,” she says as a half-assed means of consoling him as the knifepoint digs deeper into his back, very careful to not nick any nerves as she severs the connector nodes with surgeon-fine precision. Finally the last wire is sliced and the chip is pried out of his skin beneath the tiny flap of an incision she made near the spot where the chip rested under the dermal layer.

 

Kess grunts, a non-committal noise, as the chip lands out with a wet pat into her outstretched palm. She offers it around to him and Gun crumples the foil-thin metal between his fingers. Small dots of silica spread on the ground that spell out G and N in aurebesh. 

 

_Variation IV, Vivace_

 

It hits him during a game of sabacc, odd enough, how much he respects her. 

 

“Outmatched, lieutenant, by a perfect suit,” she tells him as she lays down a face card in the table’s suspension field. 

 

“Damn. My cards are atrocious tonight,” he groans as he lays out another weaker hand to be trumped by what Kess has lain out. She swipes up the cards in the suspension field and reshuffles, her mouth quirked in a small smile. 

 

“Not as atrocious as that beard you’re growing. I think I preferred you babyfaced,” she says to the Fool sitting in her hands. She looks at another face card, trying to assemble her next hand in her mind’s eye. They wager ration packets and blaster parts since credits are practically useless where they are. 

 

“Nah, I look better with it. Might make me have an air of an old vet,” he speculates, thoughtfully stroking his jawline in a gesture that is becoming secondhand to see him do. Kess rolls her eyes ceiling-ward. 

 

 

_Variation V, Andante_

 

He tries not to imagine how the markings above her eyes twist and scrunch like eyebrows, or how expressive her mouth is in the unfurling and shaping of words. They’re not of a height, but she’s not lacking in the legs department. There’s still enough of a difference that requires the captain to tilt her face up towards his own, as if raising it towards the sun to squint against its light, speculative and slow to smile.

 

One day he’ll earn her smiles easier. 

 

With that thought, Gun realizes he’s in deep shit.

 

_Variation VI, Allegro con spirito_

 

Kess is watching him across the room, of course - it’s been a somewhat nightly ritual for them both. It starts at the evening meal hour where she sits with either other officers or takes her meal with Ren. Gun will be across the room with the Exes, tightly huddled as they wolf down mass quantities of food. Either Gun or Kess will track their eyes when one or the other first gets up to leave, dipping their head in a respectful incline towards the other across the room.

 

Only tonight is the Groundies and Exes pazaak game and it alters the flow of the routine somewhat. And the volume is _loud_ as a corporal and a fast-thinking sergeant stack deck after deck of cards against each other until everyone in the infantry or entire flight wings are enraptured and making a whole lot of noise. 

 

“Wanna get out of here?” Gun passes, murmuring just above her left montral. Her skin practically twitches at the contact of his breath on it. Kess draws a tight, sharp breath as she feels the calloused patches of skin on his hands graze her elbow in an invitation to draw away from the mess hall.

 

So she does.

 

_Variation VII, Andante con moto_

 

Kess isn’t quite sure about how they’ve wedged themselves into a room barely big enough for him to fit in, or managed to fit both of their long bodies on a cot meant to hold only so much weight. They fit together like this, flawed yet perfect as he fills her and she surrounds him, saturated with about as much intimacy you can find in the middle of the war between two people that don’t even share the same species. 

 

Kess finds it doesn’t matter, these differences. She likes the slope of his strong, stubbled jaw and the bull of a nose he sports - the way he almost flinches when she sets her nails into the corded muscles along his thighs and scrapes a long, shuddering climax out of him with her undulating hips and slow, sure smile as she shatters. Even the way she sprawls out over his slab of a chest makes their bodies, so different from the other, fit in perfect, seamless harmony.

 

“Zesha,” he whispers to the ceiling, his voice filling her mind and she wants to punch him because _no one_ should say her name with that much reverence and care. She opens her mouth, a tight knot forming in her throat for some reason as she tries to find the words to fit into this particular niche of time.

 

Something creak beneath them. The legs of the cot finally give way under their combined weight, splintering into metal shards that spring haphazardly around the room. 

 

They freeze after everything is done moving and shifting, still pinned on one another. Both blink at each other, as if to ask, did that just happen? Then small, gradual chuckles crescendo into hysterical laughter that comes out of both their mouthes as the shock fades and reality sets in. They’ve managed to kill a perfectly serviceable cot.

 

_Coda: Moderato_

 

In the end, there is a great battle, narrow walls crowding ‘Troopers and Groundies into chokepoints of death. The dark, dark things not meant to see daylight from whatever corner of the galaxy they crawled out of preoccupy Rey and Kylo, the old Commander Skywalker joining them. 

 

Space and time folds itself as they fall - the bright blood on her mouth and the burning singe of flesh filling his nose as the dark comes then-

 

No, **no**. 

 

This is different. In another reality, another time, it might’ve been death for them both.

 

But this layer, made of minuscule changes that alter the flow of what could’ve happened, lies deep underneath the others. It is a different outcome. 

 

A soft, sleepy light from a burning star filters through the UV blocks on a wide viewport into the small but tidy living quarters. A low table is laden with bits and pieces of a disassembled EL-16HFE blaster rifle.

 

There’s a man bent over a small burner in a galley in this room, carefully measuring out artificial sweetener into a black brew of caf in a chipped, well-worn mug. He leaves what looks like breakfast sizzling on the hotplate to take this cup into a back room, the door sliding open with a soft hiss. The only light in here comes from the cracked ‘fresher door. It spills over rumpled sheets and the half-clothed form of a long, lithe leg. Her lekku twitch as the body beneath the pillows and sheets perceives a change of pressure in the room as he enters it, gently turning her on her side like a newborn with a massive, weathered paw of a hand.

 

“Caf,” she growls into the pillow she holds defiantly over her face despite him turning her over onto her back, holding out a hand to him. The impatient snap of her fingers indicate to him that she’s not going to carry on a conversation with him in this state, so he presses the warm, earthenware mug he’d picked up from her office desk and washed out earlier. It’s brimming with the dark blend she loves, imported caf beans from Garqi. It’d taken her a whole week’s cycle to teach him the ins and outs of her caf-press. The First Order just gave their ‘Troopers stims and weak imitation caf, not the real rich stuff Kess needed every morning. 

 

Finally, the woman pries the pillow off of her face and glances a slow, sure kiss to the corner of his mouth. 

 

“Morning breath,” she warns when he swoops lower to press his mouth to the corner of her mouth. He ignores her and angles a deeper, slower kiss that leaves her squirming - bunching the fabric of his low-slung PT pants that sit on his hips. The big man finally stands with a self-assured smirk to himself, her body half-inclined to follow despite the foggy state of her mind. Kess scowls at his retreating back, but figures the tell-tale smell of crisping bacon requires his attention more than she does. She can wait - bacon can’t. 

 

So she takes a few bracing sips from the mug in her hands, letting it warm her skin to an almost uncomfortable degree before she stands from their low, sprawling bed. Her feet skim over the floor, finding a shirt that will do before she shucks it over her shoulder. She exits the bedroom into the dimly lit living room. 

 

Gun is in the small galley, marshaling strips of fried bread onto a plate with a side of reconstituted eggs. It’s hard for her to squeeze her montrals through the neckhole, but she manages to shimmy the fabric past the long extensions of her lekku. The hem of the standard issue PT shirt stops a few inches above her knees - definitely _his_ shirt she grabbed, then. 

 

The holoterminal she passes on her way to the couch scrolls with messages for their merged inbox. The display over the galley counter is tuned into some history program about the Clone Wars, paused on the part about cloning technology on Kamino facilitating the bulk of the fighting force. She catches him watching more stuff like this lately - him making up for lost time after a life of regulated viewings and the subtle brainwashing of the First Order. The freedom he expressed in simply picking out what he could _watch_ was a whiplash reality check for her when they first started living together. Now she lets him pick out a show every other night, smiling at his turned back when he stands there scrolling for a good half hour, overwhelmed by the selection process before she intervenes and helps pick out something they can both stand watching. 

 

“I outrank you, meathead. I’m reacquiring this display. Turn on HNN,” she grouses good-naturedly, slumping over her caf mug as she weaves around all the low-sitting furniture in their living room slash office slash kitchen. Gun grumbles something about how cheap a shot it is for her to pull rank, but does the channel changing with a slight, small quirk of his mouth that betrays just how much he likes it when she does do it during these small moments. He hands off a plate of her share of breakfast to her - more meat on hers as the resident carnivore of this twosome. She sits down on the couch and waits for the feed to load, slowly shuffling food into her mouth as the caf finally kicks in. 

 

Kess finally feels vaguely alive when the feed buffers and loads on the display. 

 

Finally, the chipper voice of the HoloNet News Network’s twi’lek anchor filters in through the speakers. It’s some puff piece about Victory Day’s upcoming one year anniversary. Kess shifts uncomfortably as shots from the war pan across the screen, her old wound acting up as something lances hot just below her collarbone. Gun doesn’t even turn to her - he stops inhaling his food to squeeze her bare knee reassuringly. Kess sets her plate and utensils aside, grunting out some excuse about needing more caf. She drifts her nails across his bare shoulders as she passes along the back of the couch to get to the brimming carafe of black caf in the cramped galley.

 

She’s been offered a bigger ship with more space allotted for her personal quarters, but she likes it here in the ‘Rim where smaller ships with better hyperdrive ratings could get around without interference from the Hutts or worse. Gun always follows to her assignment, or vice versa. And always he skimps the glorified closet he manages to draw with his rank, sleeping in her quarters instead. The other officers don’t even raise a single brow. The both of them have _earned_ this slight bend in the rules. 

 

Kess settles next to Gun on the couch as he stars reassembling the blaster rifle, an older but well-loved EL-16HFE model that she’d given him on D’Qar. He pauses while jamming the stock back into place, scrubbing at a practically invisible grease stain on the carabiner with an oilcloth, his brow furrowing into lines that she wants to put her mouth on.

 

Hutts or worse is why they came to the ‘Rim to fight. An all out end to galactic slavery was the next thing on the agenda of the New Republic, and Kess was ready to enforce it. She blocks the weak glare of Tatoo I as it peeks out from behind the red ball of dust that is Tatooine, hitting a button on the wall in the galley to lower the blast shutters until the binary stars hovering just left of the planet are blocked by a few solid inches of durasteel. 

 

She picks up her holopad from where it sits, wedged between a pile of flimsies on their shared deskspace and the jewelry box that holds her mother's montral jewelry. The message is addressed ‘To the care of Admiral Zesha Kess and Major Gun...’ before it trails off into words she knows are Kylo’s. Or Rey’s, depending on which of them is writing and who is dictating while they copilot the _Falcon_. Kess smiles and tucks the message away in her ‘To Read’ folder before scrolling over Poe’s message - he and the _Finalizer_ have just hit the Triellus Trade Route, inbound to back her up on this next op. She decides to keep that bit of information to herself for a while, as Gun might silently vibrate out of his seat when he hears Finn and Poe are mere hours away from them.

 

“Something funny?” he asks somewhere near her right montral. Kess clasps her datapad to her chest and bares her teeth at him. 

 

“It’s a surprise. No peeking,” she insists, her tone exasperated as Gun tries to wriggle the datapad out of her grip. He finally gives up when she checks him right into their refrigerator unit, the both of them laughing like a pair of younglings. He lifts his hands up in surrender when she manages to pin him one-handed, nipping at his neck with her keen, pointed teeth in that strange, alien gesture of affection still coded in her blood. 

 

“I give up, you banded-headed nexu,” he grunts. 

 

Kess finally pulls away from him, clapping him on the shoulder. She wriggles her lithe, long body past him in their tiny cramped space to finish reassembling his rifle.

 

Gun holds his hand over the spot on his neck, smiling absently as he starts cleanup in the galley. He isn’t quite sure of the exact definition of perfect. He’s been brought up to believe that the closest thing to perfect is a confirmed killshot at fifty paces with a jammed rifle. Perfect is the devotion you should maintain from the Supreme Leader down to your squad’s CO. 

 

But he’s damn sure that perfect is this. Right here, in this moment.

 

With her.

 

 

**VARIATIONS ON A THEME, WITH BLASTERFIRE**

**Author's Note:**

> A small tribute to great original characters I fell in love with in a sprawling, great story.
> 
> To Ricca and Scribs, much love.
> 
> -Trebia


End file.
